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All humans laugh. However, there is little agreement about what is appropriate to laugh at. While laughter can unite people by showing how they share values and perspectives, it also has the power to separate and divide. Humor that "crosses the line" can make people feel excluded and humiliated. This collection of new essays addresses possible ways that moral and ethical lines can be drawn around humor and laughter. What would a Kantian approach to humor look like? Do games create a safe space for profanity and offense? Contributors to this volume work to establish and explain guidelines for thinking about the moral questions that arise when humor and laughter intersect with medicine, gender, race, and politics. Drawing from the work of stand-up comedians, television shows, and ethicists, this volume asserts that we are never just joking.
In this extended essay, Vittorio H sle develops a theory of the comical and applies it to interpret both the recurrent personae played by Woody Allen the actor and the philosophical issues addressed by Woody Allen the director in his films. Taking Henri Bergson's analysis of laughter as a starting point, H sle integrates aspects of other theories of laughter to construct his own more finely-articulated and expanded model. With this theory in hand, H sle discusses the incongruity in the characters played by Woody Allen and describes how these personae are realized in his work. H sle focuses on the philosophical issues in Allen's major films by exploring the identity problem in Play It Again, Sam and Zelig, the shortcomings of the positivist concept of reality in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, the relation between reality and art in The Purple Rose of Cairo, the objective validity of morality in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the power of evil in Shadows and Fog, and the relation between art and morality in Bullets over Broadway. He cites Allen's virtuosic reinterpretation of older forms of expression and his integration of the fantastic into the comic universe--elements like the giant breasts, anxious sperm, extraterrestrials, ghosts, and magicians that populate his movies--as formal moves akin to those of Aristophanes. Both an overview of Allen's work and a philosophical analysis of laughter, H sle's study demonstrates why Allen's films have more to offer us--morally, philosophically, and artistically--than just a few laughs. "In Woody Allen, Vittorio H sle goes a long way toward explaining everything you wanted to know about Allen but were afraid to ask. Just why exactly is he funny, and why does his humor have a strong appeal for academics? In his comprehensive analysis of Allen's work, H sle outlines a workable theory of humor, illustrates his conclusions by referring to the films and prose, and points out several philosophic motifs underlying Allen's deceptively complex comedies. H sle's work elevates the enjoyment of Allen's films from guilty pleasure to satisfying intellectual engagement with an intriguing contemporary thinker and artist." --Richard A. Blake, S.J., Boston College "Vittorio H sle presents a compelling overview of Allen's work in which he discusses different theories of laughter and argues for the priority of the incongruity theory as the only one able to answer the normative question, what distinguises good from bad laughter? On this theoretical basis he goes on to delve into both the humor and the philosophical profundity of Allen's films." --Sander Lee, Keene State College
“If Tina Fey and David Sedaris had a daughter, she would be Maeve Higgins.” —Glamour A startlingly hilarious essay collection about one woman’s messy path to finding her footing in New York City, from breakout comedy star and podcaster Maeve Higgins Maeve Higgins was a bestselling author and comedian in her native Ireland when, at the grand old age of thirty-one, she left the only home she’d ever known in search of something more and found herself in New York City. Together, the essays in Maeve in America create a smart, funny, and revealing portrait of a woman who aims for the stars but sometimes hits the ceiling and the inimitable city that helped make her who she is. Here are stories of not being able to afford a dress for the ball, of learning to live with yourself while you’re still figuring out how to love yourself, of the true significance of realizing what sort of shelter dog you would be. Self-aware and laugh-out-loud funny, this collection is also a fearless exploration of the awkward questions in life, such as: Is clapping too loudly at a gig a good enough reason to break up with somebody? Is it ever really possible to leave home? “Maeve Higgins is hilarious, poignant, conversational, and my favorite Irish import since U2. You’re in for a treat.” —Phoebe Robinson
You've always known writing comedy was about more than just being funny. But how do you create a joke and work it into a script or a stand-up routine? Comedian, writer, and teacher Jim Mendrinos has the answers. In The Complete Idiot s Guide to Comedy Writing, Mendrinos gives readers the principles he teaches in his popular courses, from understanding what funny is and how to find it, to how to actually construct comedy. Working through the basic constructions and forms including premises, points of view, and twists, he shows the variations of written, verbal, and physical comedy. With useful exercises, Mendrinos helps writers refine their writing, appeal to their audience, and even break writer's block by learning techniques for brainstorming, free association, lists, and finding infinite points of view.
“A very funny [memoir] about the frailties of the flesh, the absurdities of modern medicine, and how to stay sane amid it all” (Dave Eggers). Raucous family memoir meets medical adventure in this “winning literary debut” that explores the public and private theaters of illness (The New York Times Book Review). After a pituitary tumor bursts in Mike Scalise’s brain (diagnosed, by of all people a physician named Dr. Sunshine), it leaves him with a hole in head, and the hormone disorder acromegaly at age twenty-four. He also faces the exasperating challenge of navigating a new, alien world of illness maintenance among family, friends, and spouse. However, it’s his mother, who has a chronic heart condition and a flair for drama, who becomes a complicated model as she competes with her son for the status of “best sick person.” “Captur[ing] all the fright of a medical calamity and the humor and grace necessary to survive it (Kirkus Reviews), “Mike Scalise’s startling and slyly hilarious memoir is a heartfelt reminder of how astonishing, how terrifying, how absurd it is to be a body. An essential book for those who’ve lived through catastrophe, or only imagined it” (Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine).
In Untamed and Unabashed, Regina Barreca, noted authority on women and humor, examines the use of humor in the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, and Fay Weldon. She analyzes the ways that each writer uses comedic devices, especially those involving language itself, and discusses the gendered basis of their humor, providing a provocative feminist perspective on gender and comedy. Each of the essays argues that conservative critics have misread and misunderstood the importance of humor in the works of these women authors, and that women's humor serves to explode conventions oppressive to women and to offer women readers a critique of, and an alternative perspective on, the dominant cultural ideologies that contain and oppress them. The book concludes that these authors strategically deployed humor, coded in forms that women readers-but not men readers-would recognize and understand, as a means of educating and empowering those women readers. Barreca asserts that much of women's comic play has to do with power and its systematic misappropriation, allowing women to gain perspective by ridiculing the implicit insanities of a patriarchal culture. Using detailed persuasive new readings of various works of each of her chosen authors, she shows how the straightjacket of conventional femininity is challenged, confronted, and finally, thrown off. This volume demonstrates that comedy can effectively channel anger and rebellion by first making them appear to be acceptable and temporary phenomena, and then by harnessing the released energies, rather than dispersing them. This kind of comedy, which is at the heart of Untamed and Unabashed, terrifies those who hold order dear. It should.
Harry Levin--one of America's major literary critics--offers a brilliant and original study of the whole world of comedy, concentrating on playwrights through the centuries, from Aristophanes and Plautus in classical times to Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht and their recent successors. Viewing the comic repertory as a richly varied yet broadly unified whole, Levin provides a synthesis of theories and practice. Isolating two fundamental aspects of comedy--the ludicrous and irreverent "playboy," whom we laugh with, and the ridiculous and forbidding "killjoy," whom we laugh at--he traces the dialectical interplay of these components throughout history and across various cultures and media. While mainly focusing on the plays and the stage, with discussions of such major dramatists as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Molière, and William Congreve, Levin also includes essays on such related topics as humor, satire, and games.
A comprehensive guide to writing, selling and performing all types of comedy. Includes comments, advice, gags and routines from top comics.